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CANDACE VOGLER: Hello and welcome
on this beautiful evening in Chicago.
I'm Candace Vogler.
I'm one of the co-principal investigators
on the John Templeton Foundation grant called Virtue, Happiness
and the Meaning of Life.
We are currently in the midst of a working group meeting,
so we have our scholars here in Chicago.
We're reading and discussing each other's work in progress.
And as part of every working group meeting,
we get to have a public lecture.
And I am delighted tonight to be introducing
Jean Porter as our lecture for this working group meeting.
Jean Porter is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology
at Notre Dame University.
She is a noted scholar of Aquinas's work, a noted--
I don't know-- reviver of interest
in virtue ethics in recent years,
I think one of my favorite commentators on Aquinas.
Her most recent book is on justice as a virtue.
It's fantastic.
Her earlier books are also wonderful, many articles.
And she is going to speak to us tonight
on "What Should We Fear?
Courage and Cowardice in Contemporary Public Life,"
mostly American public life, a talk that
is co-sponsored by the Martin Marty Center,
the Divinity School, the Department of Philosophy,
and the Lumen Christi Institute.
Please join me in welcoming Jean Porter.
[APPLAUSE]
JEAN PORTER: I've been exhorted to speak into the mic.
And so if I move away from the mic, somebody wave at me and I
will go back to the mic.
Candace, thank you for that very kind and generous introduction,
and for the invitation.
And thank all of you for coming here.
I appreciate the chance to talk about some
of the ways in which a fairly traditional theory
of the virtues can cast what I think
is some fresh light on some contemporary public issues.
And so, with that in mind, let me
begin my lecture, which as Candace has already told you,
is titled "What Shall We Fear?
Courage and Cowardice in a Public Life."
Courage is hard to define.
We admire men and women who seem to be fearless in the face
of danger, and yet courage cannot plausibly be identified
with the absence of fear.
Fear is a natural part of our lives,
and it can be appropriate and salutary.
What is more, even a courageous individual
may well experience fear as she exposes herself
to danger for the sake of something of great value.
Near the beginning of his extended treatment
of fortitude, or courage, in the Summa Theologiae,
Aquinas identifies courage as a kind of firmness
through which the individual holds fast to the rational good
in the face of difficulties.
Admittedly, this sounds somewhat bloodless.
But for Aquinas and the classical and theological
tradition he represents, the difficulties in question
include the full variety of labor, loss, and suffering
to which we are liable, including death itself,
and rational goods include all those ideals and commitments
that are possible to us only because we are rational beings.
And as such, they serve to bring meaning to our lives,
including our love of family, friends, and associates,
our commitment to a cherished way of life,
and our further commitments to moral standards and ideals.
Seen from this perspective, the virtue of courage
depends upon a wider context of judgments and commitments.
The virtue is both possible and necessary
because we believe that some ideals and values are
worth great sacrifices and we want to live accordingly.
Understood in this way, courage is preeminently
an individual virtue.
Yet we can also describe a community or a nation
as courageous in its response to an attack.
To take one well-known example, the behavior and attitudes
of the English during the Blitz of 1940
and '41 offers an outstanding example
of collective public courage.
Somewhat to the surprise of British officials,
the civilians subjected to intensive German bombing
were not only relatively free of trauma,
they were able to carry on with their lives
and even to be cheerful in the face of repeated attacks.
Their bravery under fire depended, in key part,
on a collective commitment to maintain their way of life
and the values that sustain that way of life, even
in the face of assault. They were
prepared to lose their life for the sake of ideals
and commitments that helped to give their lives meaning.
And by standing firm, they played a key role
in turning back the proposed Nazi invasion of Great Britain.
The collective courage of the English under the Blitz was,
of course, dependent on the courage of countless
individuals, and yet it cannot be reduced to the sum
of so many courageous acts and lives.
The government promoted, and individuals cooperated
in creating a set of practices and expectations
that encouraged bravery and perseverance.
At this point, England was a brave society
which both drew its courage from individuals
and communicated it back to them.
In my remarks this evening, I want
to examine another example of public courage
and public cowardice which began to develop
within the memory of many of us and is still unfolding today.
I am referring to public reactions
to the threat of terrorism since the attacks of September 11,
2001.
During and immediately after the attacks themselves,
the men and women at the scene, together
with the police, firefighters, and medical personnel
behaved with exemplary bravery in the face
of an unimagined danger.
These clear, unambiguous examples of courage
do not call for extended analysis.
However, at another level public reactions
to the threat of terrorist attacks
present a more complex and ambiguous example.
I want to argue that we, as a nation,
responded initially to terrorist assaults and the threat
of further attacks with another kind of courage,
not physical bravery but a firm resolve
to hold on to our central values,
including equality, tolerance, and respect
for the rule of law.
However, over the past 15 years, our attitudes
as a civic society, as expressed by the actions taken
in our name, reflect a growing unwillingness
to live with risk, and correspondingly an openness
to do almost anything to our supposed enemies
in order to secure our own safety.
In other words, we as a nation have moved from courage
to a kind of cowardice when it comes
to our attitude towards these threats.
Before I go on to defend these claims,
let me say something about the approach I am taking.
The claim that our attitudes towards terrorism
has changed significantly since 9/11,
moving generally towards a more repressive and closed stance,
is not a new claim.
It was defended in a powerful book
by the lawyer and legal scholar Joseph Margulies, What
Changed When Everything Changed, and as you will see,
I draw extensively on his analysis.
Margulies and others have commented at length
on the exact contours of our changing attitudes
and the possible explanations for this trajectory.
My own attempts to reflect on these phenomena in terms
of virtues and vices is not meant
to provide an alternative social analysis,
although I do think that classical virtue theory does
suggest some insights that we might otherwise overlook.
Rather, my approach is aimed at interpreting
the trajectory of our responses to terrorist threats
in a frankly normative way.
Appeals to virtues and vices are meant
to uncover aspects of our attitudes
that are praiseworthy or blameworthy,
and more importantly, to uncover perhaps obscure motivations
for our stance towards others and the world we live in.
I realize that this is still quite general,
but I hope that my point becomes clearer as we proceed.
I should also say something about my use
of Thomas Aquinas as a source for virtue analysis.
Of course, Aquinas is a Catholic theologian,
but I do not intend to appeal to him in order
to promote a distinctively Catholic point of view.
Aquinas is becoming more and more recognized in secular
as well as Catholic and religious circles as one
of the leading interpreters of a generally Aristotelian theory
of the virtues.
And in particular, he offers a rich synthesis
of both classical and Christian sources on virtue,
integrated within an Aristotelian account
of fear and resolution and their place in human life.
As such, I believe he offers an especially valuable perspective
on the motivations behind our responses
to the primal fear of attack as these play out in public life.
But the proof of the value of this approach
can only come by hearing how I use it.
And so with that in mind, I turn to the main body of my paper.
The men and women of this country
have always taken pride in our collective commitment
to ideals of equality, tolerance,
and respect for religious beliefs and practices.
These values are integral to what
we think of as the American way of life,
and they inform our standards for fairness and equity.
Of course, we have never fully realized these values,
and at some points we have been all too quick to abandon them.
Nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that we as a nation
keep returning to these as touchstones
for national character to be reaffirmed
and progressively realized.
For that reason, our collective faithfulness to these ideals
offers a touchstone for evaluating our courage
as a nation under threat.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11,
public officials and the press spoke out
strongly in defense of the values of equality and respect
for religious freedom in the face of pressures
to hold American Muslims to account
for the terrorist activities.
President Bush set the tone for public discourse
by repeatedly reminding the country, in Margulies' words,
that Muslims and Arab Americans were not the enemy,
and mutual respect and religious tolerance
were indispensable elements of American identity.
We might question why the president felt the need
to make a point of the importance of respecting
every loyal and peaceful citizen,
but it is important to take account
of the uncertainty, confusion, and sheer terror
that gripped the nation at this time.
President Bush, together with a wide range
of other public voices, attempted
to unify the country around values
which were vulnerable at this point,
and the nation generally responded in kind.
To a remarkable extent, public and social life
went on as before without additional burdens
of repression and constraint.
At this point, and to the extent that the ideals of equality
and respect for religious pluralism
were genuinely affirmed in the face of serious threat,
the American people deserved to be called courageous.
Aquinas remarks that fortitude is most clearly exemplified
by firmness in the face of the threat of death,
especially on the part of someone fighting
on behalf of the common good.
He goes on to say that fighting in this context
can be understood expansively to include
other kinds of resoluteness in the face of hostile threats,
for example, the firmness of a judge who
pronounces a just sentence in spite
of threats from hostile forces.
As it happens, the 9/11 attacks were not
followed by further attacks, and it may well
be that we were never in as much danger in this period
as we thought we were at the time.
Nonetheless, there was a widespread sense of danger,
which at this point could not be countered given that the widely
held resolve to maintain core values does deserve
to be called a kind of courage, a firmness of mind
expressed through a sustained commitment
to what Aquinas would call goods of reason,
in this case, the ideals of equality, tolerance,
and respect for religious pluralism.
Of course, this consensus was never universal.
There were some prominent voices at this point who
challenged the benign view of Islam as a religion,
and at least by implication, called the loyalty of American
Muslims into question.
If the general consensus of favor of equality and respect
at this time was courageous, should we
call these dissenting voices cowardly?
In this case, I think the sobriquet of cowardness
is misleading.
It would imply that those who spoke against equality
and tolerance had previously held these values
and were moved by fear to renounce them.
But at this point, this doesn't seem to be the case.
Rather, those who spoke out initially
against the general consensus in favor of equality and tolerance
were in fact expressing long held convictions
that some religious or racial groups are preeminently
virtuous and others are not.
They did not change their values out of fear.
Rather, the attacks confirmed long held convictions,
and the climate of uncertainty gave them wider scope
to express these convictions.
I do think these responses reflected a vice,
but the vice in question would be injustice, a settled
disposition--
in many cases, a very long-settled disposition--
to regard and treat some classes of people
as inferior or wicked.
As Margulies argued, it was not surprising
that we heard these voices after 9/11.
Nonetheless, at least initially, the national consensus
resisted these views, so much so that the favorable perception
of Islam as a religion reached its historic high point
in October of 2001.
Yet as Margulies goes on to argue,
this collective commitment to ideals of equality and openness
eroded over the next several years.
Contrary to what we might have expected, we as a society
have moved from a stance of relative tolerance and openness
to a stance that is more repressive and intolerant
in many ways.
Public perceptions of Islam, and of Arabic nations and peoples,
have become much more negative.
At the same time, public officials
have adopted a range of practices
that once would have been unthinkable or only
rarely used, including torture, indefinite detention
without trial, and targeted assassinations.
These practices have been widely criticized,
but they also have significant and in many ways
growing support among the public.
When then candidate Trump claimed that he would not only
bring back torture, but also impose it
on the families of suspected terrorists
as well as terrorists themselves,
he was widely praised and admired for his toughness.
Now to do him justice, he has since
backed down from that claim, at least for now.
But the fact that a presidential candidate
could propose such a thing at all
says a great deal about how far we
have come from the courageous openness that
marked public life immediately after 9/11.
Margulies clearly regards this overall trajectory
as evidence of a moral decline.
I would agree.
And I would add that whatever else we might say,
these developments are symptoms of
a pervasive public cowardice.
This may seem harsh, but if we as a nation
were courageous in our affirmation of core values
immediately after 9/11, what else can
we say about our collective abandonment of these ideals
now?
It is perhaps worth emphasizing that this judgment is not
based on the levels of fear in our public life.
According to some polls, our fear of terrorism
is greater than it has ever been even though we have now
gone about 16 years without suffering another major attack
on American soil.
But what I would suggest is that this level of fear
is a symptom of a wider breakdown of public resolve,
not its cause, and not even, perhaps,
its most important expression.
Margulies gives extensive attention
to our changed policies towards torture and extrajudicial forms
of detention and killing.
I think he is right to focus on these as symptomatic,
and I will say something more about them directly.
Before doing so, however, I want to comment
on a key moment in the development
of our national character, which Margulies does not
discuss at length.
I am referring to the invasion of Iraq,
which was sold to the American people
through the manipulation of fear and pursued out
of a kind of recklessness which Aquinas would identify
as a similitude of courage.
In retrospect, it may seem wrongheaded to consider
the invasion of Iraq from the perspective of our responses
to terrorism.
Saddam Hussein was, of course, no friend of the United States,
but he was not implicated in the attacks,
and even during the buildup to the invasion
this was widely acknowledged.
More to the point, some foreign policy experts
had been making the case for regime change
in Iraq for some time, arguing that we
have both a strategic interest and a moral stake
in overturning oppressive dictators
and replacing them with some kind of democracy.
The attacks of 9/11 offered a pretext for going to war,
and at least one senior advisor argued for the invasion of Iraq
on that very day.
In fact, the actual invasion came later,
after Bush and his advisors persuaded
both the American public and many of our allies
that Hussein, with his weapons of mass destruction,
posed an immediate threat to our security.
American public, already primed to believe
in threats and dangers, accepted these claims
with very little questioning.
And why not?
The press reported on these claims
with little critical scrutiny, and those voices
that were raised in dissent were largely, although not entirely,
disregarded.
In contrast to the immediate reactions to the 9/11 attacks
themselves, the American public's responses
to the threats posed by Hussein cannot be described
as courageous.
The citizens of this country were fearful,
and they were disposed to insist on security without pausing
to consider too closely what it would
take to respond to that demand.
Of course, it is also the case that the American people
were being misled into believing that the threats they imagined
were far more credible than they actually were.
At the same time, even at this point,
prominent public officials, in a good position
to evaluate the claims being made,
were raising serious doubts, most notably,
Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector the United Nations
from 2000 to 2003.
His team conducted 700 inspections
leading up to the invasion of Iraq
without finding any evidence of weapons
of mass destruction or any capacities for producing them.
All this was known at the time, but Blix's activities
and his reservations did not have much impact
on public perceptions.
The American people were simply afraid at this point,
and they saw the world through the lens of fear.
At the same time, if public support
for the invasion of Iraq was driven by excessive fear,
we have good reason to believe that the political leaders
responsible for the invasion were not fearful enough.
At this point it is hard to say exactly what Bush and his
advisers actually believed about Hussein's supposed threats,
and we cannot speculate on the extent to which they shared
in the general climate of fear.
However, we do know that in any case, the invasion of Iraq
was motivated, in key part if not entirely,
by the conviction that we both can and should
bring about regime change to foster the growth of democracy.
What is more, those who defended this view were inclined
to believe that the necessary military actions would not
be prolonged or difficult. Tim Russert, interviewing Vice
President *** Cheney just before the invasion,
asked, "Do you think the American people are prepared
for a long, costly, and bloody battle
with significant American casualties?"
And Cheney replied, "Well, I don't
think it's unlikely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really
do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."
There's an even more telling example
of this attitude in a much-quoted article by Ron
Suskind entitled "Faith, Certainty,
and the Presidency of George Bush."
Referring to a conversation with an unnamed official
in the administration, Suskind reports
that "the aide said that guys like
me were in what we call the reality-based community, which
he defined as people who believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernible reality.
I nodded and murmured something about enlightened principles.
He cut me off.
'That's not the way the world really works.
We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.
And when you're studying that reality judiciously,
as you will, we will act again, creating other new realities
which you can study, too.
We're history's actors, and you will all be left to study us.'"
These remarks reflect represent an attitude that could
be described in a lot of ways.
But for our purposes, it will be most
helpful to consider it from the standpoint of courage
and its vices.
Certainly no one would describe these remarks as cowardly,
but we might hesitate to describe them
as truly courageous, either.
Aquinas identifies two closely related vices associated
with courage, which do seem to fit these sentiments, namely
fearlessness and audacity.
The fearless individual is, so to speak, insensible to fear,
and the audacious person is inclined to take
needless or unwise risks.
These vices are both opposed to the virtue of fortitude
because each, in its own specific way,
leads the individual away from the ideal of rational firmness
in the face of risk.
Someone who is fearless in the vicious sense
is unaware of risk, and someone who is daring
will take risks without pausing to consider
whether they are worth it.
In each case, the failure to give due weight
to danger and risk keeps the individual
from giving due consideration to values and the kinds of costs
that we should be prepared to pay to preserve our values.
He cannot stand fast in the light of fears because he is
not aware that he has any real reason to be afraid,
or else he just enjoys taking risks.
The result, in either case, is a kind of recklessness
which looks like courage but lacks
the firmness that comes from a realistic weighing of value
and risk.
It would be interesting to consider whether, and in what
ways, excessive fearfulness and recklessness can
be combined in the character of one individual.
But they can certainly come together in one community,
as the attitudes leading up to the invasion of Iraq
make clear.
Individuals who are oppressed by fear
are likely to welcome political leaders who
give the impression of being fearless, prepared to confront
and defeat whatever dangers are on the horizon.
By the same token, however, this combination of private fear
and public recklessness cannot provide a stable basis
for public peace.
To the extent that public confidence depends
on the recklessness of its leaders,
it is bound to be undermined when recklessness fails,
as sooner or later it will do.
I want to suggest that this dynamic may
help to explain why public fear of terrorism
seems to be increasing even as our memories
of the last major terrorist attack on US soil
become more remote.
Our experiences in Iraq, and subsequently in Libya,
make it clear that we cannot control the dangers that we
face or shape reality to our moral specifications.
At the end of the day, our only real options
are cowardice or courage, and without a realistic assessment
of the dangers that we face and the limits of our power,
courage will be hard to come by.
At this point, let's return to Margulies' examples
of our changing attitudes towards practices
that once were unthinkable, or at least
widely condemned, including torture, indefinite detention,
and targeted assassination.
It is certainly true, as he acknowledges,
that our attitudes have never been static or uniform
in these matters.
Nonetheless, over the past 16 years,
public opinion on these practices
has fairly consistently moved in a direction
of greater acceptance.
Margulies clearly regards these developments as morally
regrettable, and so do I. I would
add that whatever else might be said about our changing
perceptions of these practices, the widespread support
that they receive is itself an indication of public cowardice.
We endorse, or in some cases ignore,
the abuses carried on in our name
because we are afraid, heightened now
by the failure of our political leaders
to reshape the world as they promised to do.
These attitudes do not reflect the firmness of mind resolve
to hold on to core values even in the face of danger.
Can we deny that there is now a strong strain of cowardice
in our national character?
Our changing attitudes towards torture
offer an especially clear illustration
of the dynamics of character and their influence
on public sentiment.
More specifically, they illustrate the ways
in which our judgements are formed, and sometimes
misformed, by destructive fear.
At one point, Aquinas asked whether the passions can move
the will, and he replies that they cannot do so directly.
However, they can have a profound effect on the will
indirectly by shaping the judgments of our reason.
Under the influence of passion, some object or course of action
may appear good even though the individual would reject it
in a cool hour.
I think it is safe to say we all know what this means.
This capacity for re-description accounts for many a failed diet
and many a broken New Year's resolution.
More seriously, our abilities to re-describe what we are doing
can undermine our deepest commitments
by saving us from facing just what it is that we are doing
or allowing to be done in our name.
The re-description of torture offers a sterling example
of this.
Many of you will be familiar with the main lines
of this story.
In the months immediately following
the attacks of September, 2001, agents from the FBI and the CIA
began practicing what they described
as enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding, sleep
deprivation for as long as 11 days, forced stress
positions, and wall standing, that is,
suspending prisoners by hooks in the ceiling for several hours
at a time.
Some of those involved began to worry, with good reason,
that these practices are in violation
of domestic and international law.
In response to their request, the Office
of Legal Counsel and the Department of Justice
issued two memos arguing that these forms
of enhanced interrogation are, in fact, in accordance
with national and international law.
One of these, the so-called torture memo,
was subsequently released to the press.
According to this memo, enhanced interrogations
are legal unless they inflict excruciating and agonizing pain
equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying
serious physical injury such as organ failure,
impairment of bodily functions, or even death.
In order to see just how drastically this
narrows the scope of what counts as torture, compare
the definition in the United Nations Convention
Against Torture, which was ratified by the United States
in 1990, and I quote, "Torture means
any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical
or mental, is intentionally inflicted
on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him
or a third person information or a confession."
Initially the release of the torture memo
and further disclosures about the practices behind it
generated widespread outrage.
Senator John McCain introduced legislation
that would confine military interrogations
to non-coercive practices and place constraints on the CIA,
arguing that what differentiates us
as the United States of America from other countries
is the fact that we do not torture.
However, as Margulies goes on to recount,
in 2006 the Bush Administration, for the first time,
publicly began to acknowledge and defend
enhanced interrogation policies.
In a speech in 2006, Bush began by reminding
the American public of the nightmare attack
that forced us into an unprecedented war
against an enemy unlike any we had fought before.
He went on to emphasize the importance of intelligence,
which he said could best be obtained
from terrorists themselves.
In order to obtain this information,
interrogators needed access to enhanced interrogation
techniques, which, he asserted, are not the same as torture.
"We as Americans do not torture," he said.
He did not add that we feel free to change
the definition of torture so that whatever we are doing
is not counting as torture.
Margulies argues that this change of approach
played a critical role in changing public perceptions.
The result has been sobering.
In late 2001 and early 2002, when the perceived threat
was at its peak and the demand for immediate intelligence
was palpable, only a small fraction of the population
supported the idea of torture as a governmental policy.
A decade later, the proportion had
swollen to more than half the population.
Within some segments of society, support for torture
is overwhelming.
Of course, this is not the end of the story.
In 2008, Barack Obama was elected
by an overwhelming majority, due in part
to widespread opposition to some aspects of Bush's
anti-terrorism policies.
In early 2009, in one of his first official acts,
Obama banned torture and close the US intelligence facilities
in which it had taken place.
These actions were widely praised
but they also met with widespread criticism.
More importantly, Obama himself did not
follow through with any kind of investigation
into the origins and development of the programs in question,
and to some extent, he discouraged the Senate
from pursuing its own investigations.
Much less did he call for the prosecution
of those individuals involved in authorizing and carrying
out these practices, as he was, in fact, bound
by international law to do.
Had he done so, our repudiation of
torture as a policy would have been placed on a basis legally
and socially that would be very, very hard to undo.
As matters stand, it would be relatively easy
for President Trump to reinstitute torture as a policy
if that is what he finally decides to do.
And if he does so, he would likely have wide support.
According to a survey by the Pew Research Center published
in February of last year, 58% of all Americans support
torture in some circumstances.
We can mention other examples of practices and attitudes
which were once widely condemned and now are widely accepted.
Near the beginning of Obama's first term,
there was widespread support for closing the prison
at Guantanamo, thus effectively ending
a practice of indefinite detention without trial.
Yet by 2010, this support had largely vanished,
and majorities now consistently oppose closing Guantanamo
and favor trying suspects in military rather than civilian
courts.
The Patriot Act, which authorizes indefinite detention
and secret surveillance, among other provisions,
has been renewed every four years with bipartisan support
and little public outcry.
Even more troubling, Muslim communities
have been subjected to infiltration and surveillance
with almost no public reaction.
We can be grateful that Trump's proposed travel bans targeting
several predominantly Muslim countries
were blocked by the courts, but these
were only extreme expressions of attitudes that have not
been widely challenged.
Finally, it is worth noting that Obama
expanded the use of drones and targeted
killing by almost tenfold compared to the Bush
administration.
And here, too, he had the support
of the majority of the public, at least as late as early 2015.
Again, about 58% were in favor of the use of drones,
although almost half of these polled also
expressed some concerns about civilian casualties.
While we may disagree about some of these details,
it seems clear that the American public opinions and sentiments
have moved unevenly but steadily in the direction of greater
fearfulness and less commitment to the ideals of equality,
tolerance, and respect that we still cherish as part
of our national identity.
I have argued that these developments can be interpreted
in terms of classical conceptions of courage
and cowardice.
If the hallmark of courage is firmness in the face of danger,
then we must admit that we as a nation
have not been consistently courageous
and we are paying a price.
Of failure of courage is morally problematic in itself.
And in addition, it gives rise to false perspectives
which distort our view of others and the world we inhabit.
Paradoxically, excessive fear is closely linked
to various forms of recklessness, which provide
at best a brittle security.
Fear is intolerant and unkind, and it makes enemies
where we most need friends.
It leads us away from our values and it undercuts the resources
that we need precisely in order to face dangers effectively.
At, the same time I do not want to claim that we as a society
are simply cowardly, or much less
to suggest that we have no resources for a better response
to the dangers we face.
We expect individuals to develop some consistency of character,
but a community will never be completely
consistent in its attitudes and dispositions.
In this context, inconsistency is potentially a good thing.
Even in our worst moments, we collectively
have resources of courage that we can identify and develop.
It is important to remember that we as a nation
initially responded to the attacks of 9/11
with great courage, expressed through a collective resolution
to live by core values in the face of this dire threat.
Aquinas observes that courage is most evident in our responses
to sudden events.
We have reason to hope that this collective courage represents
something more central to our identity
than later examples of our collective failure of nerve.
At the beginning of my remarks this evening,
I observed that while the virtues are, strictly speaking,
qualities of individuals, it can be
helpful to identify public virtues and vices,
understanding the term in an extended,
but I hope legitimate, sense.
I would now add that one advantage to this approach
is that it avoids moralizing judgements
on individuals, or on distinct classes or political factions.
We are all responsible for the moral quality of our community,
implicated in its failures, and jointly responsible
for its good estate.
With this in mind, I want to suggest some strategies
for reclaiming the courage that is
central to our national character at its best
and avoiding the temptation to recklessness and cowardice
that are still very much a part of our day-to-day experience.
The first of these is the most obvious.
But in our current political climate
it would be easy to overlook it and perhaps
difficult to attain it.
The hallmark of courage is a firm and resolute adherence
to values in the face of danger.
That is, the courageous individual our community
is prepared to run risks, even significant risks,
rather than sacrificing or betraying
centrally important ideals and commitments.
This implies that if we as a community
are to reclaim courage, we need an extended public conversation
about the risks we face, the values that we share,
and the levels of risk that we are
prepared to endure for the sake of holding on to these values.
We as a community have not had many conversations like this
recently, and yet they are essential for generating
a sense of national solidarity and resolve.
Public debates over risk and value
require, first of all, an honest examination of the dangers
that we actually do face, and that in itself
will be a challenge.
In many cases, we will find that our fears are exaggerated,
but in other respects we are probably not afraid enough.
In any case, once we have attained
some measure of sober realism about the dangers we face,
we will be in a position to debate
which kinds and levels of risks are worth it given
the values that are at stake.
Are we prepared to give up some measure of security
in order to maintain a relatively open and tolerant
society?
Are we willing to rule out unjust or cruel practices
such as torture even for the sake of securing greater
safety?
These are two examples of a range of hard questions
that we as a society need to discuss in order
to develop the quality of reflective firmness
that is central to courage.
This brings me to a second strategy.
A serious consideration of danger and risk
is difficult, and yet necessary, because dangers frighten us.
But these considerations are not only frightening.
They are also frankly depressing.
Fundamentally, we have less power than we believe or wish
we had, and there are many wrongs in this world that we
cannot put right.
In order to develop and sustain courage,
we need to cultivate other virtues which
enable us to live with the regrets and the sadness
and inevitably follow up on a consideration of world affairs.
Aquinas mentions two virtues which
are especially relevant to our current situation, namely
patience and perseverance.
Both resemble courage insofar as each
has something to do with maintaining firmness of mind
in the face of difficulty.
At the same time, neither is directly concerned
with fear and danger.
The virtue of patience enables someone
to hold on to ideals and commitments
in the face of sadness, and perseverance
is expressed through persistence in doing good
even when one's efforts seem pointless and futile.
These are the quotidian virtues that
come to the fore when we are not in the middle of a crisis,
and as such, they are likely to strike us as relatively
unimportant.
Yet I want to suggest that patience and perseverance have
a critical role to play in our public life
as well as in our individual lives.
Both virtues dispose us to acknowledge
the many forms of injustice, poverty,
and longstanding hostility that give rise
to terrorism, to accept that some of these ills
are beyond our control, and that others can be addressed only
through persistent, patient, long-term action.
Patience in particular is a safeguard against recklessness
and the recurrence of fear that so often follows
on the collapse of recklessness.
Both virtues provide a context for the deliberation
and judgment of practical wisdom, collectively as well
as individually, by keeping us in the reality-based community
that is ultimately our moral and practical home.
Above all, patience and perseverance,
together with courage itself, play an indispensable role
in sustaining our commitment to justice.
The ideals of justice, in turn, motivate and inspire us to live
courageously as a community that cannot be frightened
into self-betrayal.
We exhibited that courage most immediately
in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 9/11.
And we have the resources to reclaim that courage today.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
I really enjoyed that.
I have a question, though, about your brief remark
that one of the marks of public virtue, or maybe civic virtue,
is collective responsibility.
And I just wondered if you could say
more about what that really amounts
to, practically speaking.
And also, does it come with collective guilt?
JEAN PORTER: Well, I think if you
pass any kind of collective moral judgment at all,
you have to talk about both collective praise
and collective blame or guilt. Now
I don't have a strong theory of that.
I'm not making judgments here about the extent
to which individuals are voluntarily
responsible for or morally implicated in social sins.
So I'm making a low-flying non-theoretical point.
But I still think there's something to it.
I mean, we do have a sense of what it means as a community
to reflect and to deliberate.
We take stands as a community which
come out of our individual commitments and choices
but can't be reduced to the sum of these.
I take it as a hallmark of a public stance,
whether virtuous or vicious, that in some way
it reflects both widespread public view, which
I know is never universal, and also
some significant public action.
And so in all these senses, I do think
it makes sense to talk in terms of collective responsibility.
But I repeat, I don't have a strong theory here
of corporatism or anything of that sort.
I'm simply trying to capture what
I think is a fairly evident, and on a low-flying level, a fairly
obvious feature of public life, that we do deliberate
in these ways and take responsibilities in these ways.
Cathy?
Someone hand the lady a mic.
AUDIENCE: Jean, I know that you're
interested in legal developments when you talk about and read
about these things.
In all the years since 9/11, I would
say that the courts have been consistent upholders
of the values that you talked about in the beginning,
beginning with all the rights they've accorded
to prisoners in Guantanamo.
And I would note that in the travel ban case in Hawaii,
the circuit court, the Ninth Circuit court,
raised questions about the precedent of Korematsu, which
I think is very interesting.
Now I think there's a big legal difference between Korematsu
and the Muslim ban, perhaps.
But the fact that people are thinking
about what history has taught us, I think, is interesting.
I wonder if you regard those signs as a little bit more
hopeful.
JEAN PORTER: I generally agree with you.
I mean, I should add, for those of you who don't know her,
Cathy is a student of mine and a former judge,
so she's certainly in a position to talk
about law, far more than I am.
But I do watch what the courts do,
and I think generally you're right.
And that gets to a point that I think
connects with Jennifer's question as well.
I talk about broad trends here, and I
talk about the general direction of a public consensus,
and I think that that's legitimate and important.
But these matters are never universal,
and when things are generally going well,
that's a moral danger.
But when we're having trouble collecting ourselves morally,
there are always going to be some resources.
There's always going to be something that can leverage
a wider positive change.
And in this case, I think the courts have generally
played a very positive role.
And Neil Gorsuch is saying in press conferences,
we have to obtain the rule of law,
and we're a country of laws and not men and women.
So hey, power to him.
OK.
Now I want to field my own question,
but there's like five people with their hands up.
I'm just going to start with you and go around the room.
So hand the gentleman a mic.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for your talk.
I have a question about the middle third of that definition
of fortitude.
In the face of danger, I think Aquinas
would grant the contiguity of nearby dangers
and faraway dangers.
Your reference to the blitzkrieg, I think,
is a helpful one in understanding
contemporary events.
But whereas the inhabitants of London and other British cities
learned about bombing through the rumbling of the earth,
and we today learn about terrorist attacks
through cable news or our smart phones, what
are the avenues by which we perceive danger?
How do they affect our standpoint of rational goods?
JEAN PORTER: That's a good question.
And you raise a point that sort of highlights one
of my own assumptions, and I'll just say it.
I would be prepared to defend it.
But you're quite right I hadn't given it
the attention I should have.
I do think that courage, in the proper sense,
involves firmness of mind not only
in the face of an immediate and imminent threat,
but in the contemplation of a likely or even
a possible threat.
Otherwise, to take a very sort of banal example,
a soldier will not be courageous except when
he's actually under fire.
Someone who is preparing to undertake a dangerous mission
and did it with resolve couldn't be
called courageous until they actually
started shooting at him.
And I don't think anyone really wants to hold that.
I think your point about the ways in which we become aware
of threats is very important because it touches on something
that I think is really hard to get right,
but very important in thinking not only about courage, but all
the virtues.
The moral virtues are bound up with perceptions.
And the ways in which we form our perceptions,
and the ways in which perceptions are fed to us
both say a lot about why we're responding in the ways
that we do.
And then in turn, the ways in which
we appropriate and develop them say
a lot about our own virtuous character.
And I think in this case, the ways in which our dangers are
presented to us and described by us
and perceived by us are not morally neutral.
I think it's morally relevant that we perceive dangers
as being far greater than they are.
I don't think that's just misinformation.
I think the perception is a result of fear.
And I think by the same token, the ways in which the media
picks up on dangers, feeds them to us,
emphasizes certain aspects, de-emphasizes others--
you know, all of this, I think, is not morally neutral.
Parenthetically, I was in England
when The New York Times published all the pictures
from the Manchester bombing scene.
And you know, I'm all for free press and all that,
and I'm not going to prosecute them or anything.
But I had two reactions.
One was that I understood why the British government
and the British police were very, very, very, very unhappy.
But my other thought was, why did they do that?
Why did New York Times need to do that?
And what does that say about the ways in which the press also
is implicated in a climate of fear and a culture of fear?
Am I over answering your question?
I tend to get carried away.
OK.
Now let me see.
Everybody raise your hand so I can kind of see.
OK.
Let me start with Tal, Bob, and then this lady here, and then
Michael, and then Eric.
I'm good, aren't I?
So give Tal a microphone.
You've got to have a mic, Tal.
AUDIENCE: Oh, now I do.
So I guess I'm--
I'm thinking about the figure who's
interviewed in the Suskind piece that you mentioned.
And you called him audacious and understood
that to be a kind of a tendency toward recklessness
in assessment of risk.
But it seems to me that there's a more specific account
of the flaw in the outlook that we encounter there.
That figure doesn't seem to me to exhibit
a general audaciousness in the face of risk,
but rather a kind of hubris about capacity
to reshape the world.
So in plotting the details of military actions, exercises,
invasions, such a figure might be very risk averse when
it comes to putting American lives at risk,
but still be insensitive to the particular risks posed
by attempts to reshape the course of history.
And for me, that suggests a different kind of vice,
a hubris, an overestimation of capacity to predict,
and control events.
And I suppose I see something like that same vice showing up
in public affirmation of extrajudicial killings
and detentions and torture.
There's a tendency to disregard the fog that presents itself
to anybody who wishes to use such violence in the name
of bringing about good results.
And when that fog is ignored, and one
is bitten by the temptation to overestimate one's grip on how
things really are and what it would take to reshape them,
torture, extrajudicial killings, and detentions all
look somewhat more palatable, even if one might still
have a strong reaction of conscience against them.
So just another suggestion about what vice
might be combining with certain kinds of cowardice
to produce our current pathologies.
JEAN PORTER: Well, you know, the vices are not exclusive.
I mean, generally-- I mean, they're
not exactly connected the way the virtues are.
But they do tend to run in packs.
I wouldn't deny much of what you say, Tal,
but I would just go back to my comments
in answering this gentleman's question.
How do you come to have a view of the world that lets you say
confidently, we shape reality and you're
going to study the reality that we shape?
A lot goes into that.
A lot of things have to go wrong for you
to begin to think that way.
But I would suggest that one plausible construal of what's
going on is that a certain insensibility to fear
has contributed to a way of thinking about the world
and assuming that one's power and control are greater
than they normally would be.
To put it in the old-fashioned way, the fearlessness,
in this case, I think, removes an impediment
to other kinds of vicious and sinful behavior.
And certainly the effect of the invasion
was a kind of recklessness.
And my larger point is that recklessness and fear
are always going to go hand in hand, that if you're reckless--
this is the collective you, the rhetorical you--
if you're reckless, reality is going to get you.
And then the likely response to that
is going to be a rebound into fear, which I think we've seen.
Bob, I think you were next.
AUDIENCE: You've spoken very inspiringly about.
Courage but you also spoke about justice and wisdom.
And I have a--
kind of a-- maybe a somewhat technical question
about the individuation of these virtues.
Would you say that justice is a part of courage?
Is wisdom a part or aspect of courage?
And so one question that could be raised in this theme
would be whether there can be unjust courage or unwise
courage, whether it's possible to separate
those other virtues.
JEAN PORTER: Well, let me distinguish
between the virtues, properly speaking,
and the extended sense in which I'm using the term.
Aquinas says of the virtues properly speaking,
as character traits of individuals,
you can understand them in one of two ways,
as general qualities which are present in any moral act,
or as qualities which pertain to distinctive faculties
and have distinctive fields of operation.
Now the latter way of understanding
that is Aquinas's preferred way, and mine too, for that matter,
when we're talking about individuals.
When you talk about virtues at the public
or the communal level, I think it makes more sense
to speak of the virtues in the former way,
that these are qualities of character and disposition
and action, each of which is present in praiseworthy
or resolute activities, and which
break down in different and interesting ways
when you're in a period of moral breakdown.
Now I would say that at both the public and at the individual
level, you cannot have unjust or unwise courage,
that what you have is a similitude of courage.
In order for that to be something other
than stipulative, you have to talk a little more about what's
at stake in saying the virtues are
connected in the ways they are.
And without nattering on about that, which I can do--
I natter with the best of them--
I will say that at the public level,
the attitudes that are implicated
in our particular action are always
going to have a long-term effect in the moral
and just the practical course of what we do.
Again, I think this is illustrated
by the invasion of Iraq.
This looked courageous.
It looked bold.
It even could look like an act of justice or altruism,
you know, we wanted to liberate the people.
But it was not wise.
I think it was not just.
And the attitudes and commitments
and values that we had were not of a kind
that could sustain anything other than a certain kind
of recklessness.
And I think that's part of why the whole stance broke down.
So anyway, we can come back to this,
but that would be my general point.
I don't know your name, ma'am, but I think you're next.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
JEAN PORTER: Hi.
AUDIENCE: My name's Ellen.
I'm just visiting.
But I guess one question was--
just a simple one-- was, who is Margulis,
who you referred to a lot?
I wasn't sure.
But just the other is, how does this apply
to kind of the fascist state?
It seems to me the state is acting in a--
intentionally using fear mongering to have forever war.
So I don't know if you can comment on that.
JEAN PORTER: Oh yeah, I sure can.
First of all, Joseph Margolis, the author
of the book I rely on, What Changed
When Everything Changed, he is a lawyer and a legal scholar.
He was very heavily involved in the defenses of some
of the Guantanamo Bay convicts.
So he's someone who has a very long and extensive experience,
practically as well as theoretically,
with these issues.
When you say the fascist state, I'm not sure
whether you mean specifically fascism as we experienced it
in Germany and Italy, or if you mean generally a kind
of collectivism in control.
I think, in the case of German--
especially German, and to some extent Italian fascism--
fear played a central part in giving some legitimacy
to the National Socialist regime because it played on
people's fear of being squeezed out,
their fear of not having sufficient space
or land to survive, the sense that they were in a competition
that they were in danger of losing.
And you know, these things never come alone.
I mean, it also played into a whole range
of attitudes of resentment, anger, the deep anti-Semitism.
So fear was not the only factor, but it was a factor.
I think the general point is well-taken,
and I think it's a very reasonable worry
that when people are afraid, they
become very willing to turn to whoever
or whatever they think is going to protect them.
And they become ready to do what it takes to be protected.
That's why I think it's so important
to think about courage at the public level.
Parenthetically, one of the things I looked at--
I looked at all kinds of things in the public discourse--
and one of them was an article by a woman named Molly Ball
in September of 2016.
And she said, if Trump is elected,
it will be because of our fear.
And I read that and I thought, that was a prophetic article.
I think that that explains a lot.
Doesn't explain everything, but it explains a lot.
Michael?
AUDIENCE: Hi.
Thanks, Jean.
That was really interesting.
You mentioned towards the end ways
in which we can try to better the situation going forwards,
which is having franker and better informed
discussions about what the risks actually are and so forth.
And so I was thinking in the same spirit about more
remote kinds of preparation.
And to some extent they have to do with virtues,
and I know that'll please you.
So anyway, I'm just going to throw two things out and then
invite you to comment if you want.
The first has to do with what I, at any rate,
take to be a kind of very widespread
intellectual failing, even a philosophical failing,
which is simply that a lot of people think--
I think this is extremely widespread-- at the end
of the day, the end really does justify the means.
And it's unfortunate to bomb orphanages,
but sometimes you just have to do that.
And at least from my perspective philosophically,
there actually are some things that are always wrong to do.
And if people were more willing to countenance that, then they
would be more willing to say things like,
we'll never torture people, rather than just, well,
we'll try really hard not to.
And philosophers, of course, share a lot of blame
for encouraging this end justifies the means mentality.
Anyway I'm just thinking like sort of intellectual deepening
and improvement would be part of a longer term strategy.
The other thing is, it strikes me that, to a very significant
extent, we have a sort of hedonistic and self-indulgent
culture.
Physical and psychological comfort
are extremely important to us.
And when people are like that, it's not surprising
when they aren't courageous.
And I sometimes think if we were a little bit tougher,
then we could be a little braver.
JEAN PORTER: You're making a couple
of very interesting and very good points.
And you know, sharp philosopher that you are,
you're picking up on the fact that I
have a lot of presuppositions behind this talk, one of which
is that indeed there are some kinds of things
that ought never be done.
I think we have to tread very carefully here because I
certainly don't want to say that you
have to hold that view in order to be a virtuous person.
I mean, that would be kind of like an example of hubris,
and even I cannot rise to that level of hubris.
There's a lot of room for good faith disagreement
at the theoretical as well as at the practical level.
I think at the same time--
well, there are two things I would say.
One is, I do think that we do have a stake in defending
some version of the claim that I think you and I share.
And it does have a practical point,
and acknowledging that practical point doesn't
mean condemning or ruling out of sort of moral conversation.
People who seriously entertain different theoretical views.
But it does help to remind us that what we're doing
is not just theory.
I don't think it ever is just theory.
The other point about being tougher.
Wouldn't hurt-- you know, again, this
has to do with the ways in which we construe our situation,
the kinds of deprivations or penalties
or sorrows that we're willing to endure.
I have thought for a long time, and this is not a popular view,
that we made a big mistake eliminating the draft.
And part of the reason for that is
that I think it's fairer to put a burden of national defense
on everybody impartially.
And yes, I would draft women as well as men.
But I think it's also the case that universal conscription
would give everyone a stake in dealing with these issues
that we otherwise don't have, and it would toughen us up.
So yeah, I mean, I agree with you,
and I think there are some practical ways
we might consider addressing some of these issues.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
Eric, I'm sorry.
There you are.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Jean.
I was wondering if you could help us shed some light
on the metacognitive aspects.
And so it strikes me as a relatively robust fact
that the people, by and large the men,
who think of themselves as most courageous, decisive, realist,
and so on are also the first to flinch
in the face of relatively minor dangers,
and therefore the least courageous.
What sort of failure is this, by your lights?
JEAN PORTER: Well, if that is in fact the case--
and I'll take your word for it that it is--
I would say that there are two problems there.
One is cowardice and the other is a lack of self-knowledge.
I mean, in a way this gets to Michael's problem.
I think for any of us, for communities
and for individuals--
well, again, it really goes back to Tal's question-- you know,
the vices tend to run in packs.
We aren't aware of ourselves as courageous or cowardly
because we haven't really faced dangers directly and head on.
The dangers that we face are remote or theoretical,
and we may not recognize our responses
for what they are because we don't
have a touchstone of judging how we
respond to an immediate or sudden threat.
So I think it's very easy to deceive ourselves in this way
and kind of important to try not to do it.
But I do think we can move beyond self-deception.
On that I will hold pretty firm.
Shall we stop?
OK.
Good night.
[APPLAUSE]